Summer engineering camps planned next month

Students participate in an N.C. State University summer engineering camp in Wilson last June. Contributed Photo

Posted
Thursday, May 24, 2018 8:50 pm

For the Times

Elementary and middle school day campers are able to problem solve real-world engineering challenges at North Carolina State University’s Summer Engineering Camps to be held on the campus of Wilson Community College this summer.

The camp is sponsored by N.C. State’s College of Engineering, The Engineering Place and the Upper Coastal Plain Learning Council. Both elementary and middle school Wilson camps will be held during the week of June 18-22.

“An engineer’s job is never done. We are always asking ourselves, ‘How can this be improved?’” said Martha Bizzell, director of the camps and an NCSU engineer herself. “The campers are having fun exploring with their team how to solve a problem. They have a purpose and buy-in. They build, test, fail, redesign, build again, test again…”

“The mind grows the most when we learn from our mistakes. This is a good combination of fun, teamwork and learning,” Bizzell observed.

In addition to robotics, students will launch rockets to transport materials to “remote” locations, create Rube Goldberg machines adding their own 3-D printed contraption to initiate a series of conditional events, and design a helmet to protect their gourd. They will also experiment with different chemicals as they determine the optimal combination safe for packaging and transporting their design.

For more information on the NCSU-Wilson engineering summer camps, email Betty Jones at bnjones5@ncsu.edu or Kathy Lawson at kllawso2@ncsu.edu. Register online via this shortened link: https://bit.ly/2s3vZDu.